Thrashy

Thrashy, 19 days ago (edited 18 days ago)

I’ve got the good fortune to have an >800 credit score, and even the offers I’ve seen from “status symbol” card issuers have had bonkers-high interest even when the Fed was holding the prime rate close to zero. The lowest I’ve ever seen was still around 15%, and even at that “low” rate you’d have to be truly desperate to carry a balance. Even unsecured personal loans tend to carry interest rates at half of what a credit card offers.

Thrashy, 19 days ago (edited 19 days ago)

I live in an old, once-redlined streetcar suburb, and my folks are about a half hour away in a new, nearly-exurban tract home development. They love to see their grandson and are happy to babysit him when my wife and I want a date night, but we’ve just about stopped taking them up on that offer because every restaurant in a reasonable distance from their neighborhood is some mediocre, mid-market national chain that’s utterly devoid of charm, serving plates that have been ruthlessly value-engineered to minimize the need for specialized equipment or skilled talent in the kitchen. The area is quiet, I guess, and I’m sure the land was cheap, but there’s no there there.

Thrashy, 19 days ago (edited 18 days ago)

Can’t take credit – it was originally coined by Gertrude Stein – but it’s a very apt turn of phrase to describe the placelessness of American suburbia.

Thrashy, 20 days ago

I mean, if nothing else they got Republicans to embrace gun control.

Thrashy, 20 days ago (edited 19 days ago)

Okay, body slams are out, but what about The People’s Elbow?

Thrashy, 20 days ago

It’s fun to mock sovcit whackos, but this is the sort of thing that gives them the idea that there are magic words they can invoke that let them wallhack through the legal system. The judicial system has spent literally hundreds of years working hand-in-glove with police and prosecutors to make it as difficult as possible for the everyday citizen to exercise the legal rights that protect you from them, and only by knowing exactly how to navigate the legal labyrinth set up between you and those rights can you actually use them.

Thrashy, 20 days ago

Problem is that if you’re looking for FOSS software outside of the absolute most mainstream use cases, that type of software is the only available option. GIMP and Inkscape have been mentioned but throw FreeCAD into the ring as well. Shotcut and Kdenlive are passable, but don’t quite measure up to the commercial alternatives.

My particular hobby horse is CFD code. OpenFOAM is fantastic from a technical standpoint, but until recently, to actually use it you either had to buy a commercial front-end, or literally write C++ header files to set up your cases. There’s a heroic Korean developer who’s put together a basic but very functional front-end GUI in the last year to change that, but it only covers relatively straightforward cases at the moment.

Thrashy, 21 days ago

Fun fact! In America, bartenders are more likely to die due to a violent incident at work than police are. Overall many trades are deadlier than policing, including fishing, forestry, and roofing.

So when we as a society decide it’s acceptable for roofers to only fix the shingles they can reach from the ground and lumberjacks to only fell trees less than 15’ tall, I’ll give cops a pass for half-assing their jobs and treating their own personal safety as more important than that of the public they claim to serve and protect. Until then I would tell them to suck it up, put on their big boy pants, and actually try and do what we collectively pay through the nose for them to do, and deal with the kind of oversight and accountability that they have so far fought tooth and nail to avoid.

Thrashy, 21 days ago

As the parent of a toddler, there have been a lot of these lately between Ukraine, Gaza, the earthquake in Turkey and any of a dozen other natural disasters and brutal wars of ethnic cleansing, and I don’t expect the pace to slow down soon.

Thrashy, 20 days ago

The oldest car I’ve dailied was a Honda CRX that was just shy of 20 years old when I sold it. Supply was getting sparse on the ground, but I could get even some rare, single-model-year, variant-specific parts from the dealership parts counter until right around the end of my ownership.

Currently I’m driving a 17-year-old Fit and honestly, I’m not too worried. Even if I can’t get something new, it’s right about in the sweet spot for junkyard availability.

Thrashy, 22 days ago

Good for you. In 2008 I went from having standing offers for paid internships at a half-dozen architecture firms to not knowing of a single open entry-level position in a 500 mile radius, and it stayed that way for almost three years. I graduated in 2010 and spent the next year mostly-unemployed in my parents’ spare bedroom, applying to every listing for a fresh-out position nationwide and not getting so much an automated courtesy email to let me know my resume didn’t make it the top of the pile of hundreds of others doing the exact same thing. I spent a year working for less than minimum wage as an illegally-misclassified “contractor” sorting mail and running errands, just to get an architecture firm on my resume. My best friend from architecture school became a barista and joined the National Guard to cover his student loan payments, and didn’t land a job in the field he spent five years training to enter for another five years.

Inflation sucks right now, but this is a fucking cakewalk compared to the Great Recession. Lucky for you that you were in a position to capitalize on the misfortune of others, but don’t forget for a second that millions of us went through years of misery.

Thrashy, 24 days ago

Water and sewer are overwhelmingly public utilities in the US. This is more a case of small-time bureaucratic incompetence than corporate avarice – think along the lines of your grandpa writing the default Wifi password on the front of the router because he can’t remember it and doesn’t know how to change it, except Grandpa is in charge of a rural water district, and the router is the control system for the chlorine treatment.

Where water service is expensive in the US it’s usually because decades-old infrastructure built to support far-flung suburban development are starting to fall apart, and there was never a plan to pay for replacement. Some places are also being required by the EPA to separate ancient combined storm and sanitary sewers, which basically entails a complete replacement of the sewers at a cost of billions. Infrastructure is expensive to maintain, especially if you spend a few decades ignoring it first.

Thrashy, 24 days ago

I’m a lab planner, and sometimes getting researchers to describe what sort of containment device they need for a given process is like pulling teeth.

• Chemical fume hood? That’s a hood.
• Class II, Type B2 BSC? Also a hood.
• Class II, Type A2 BSC? Believe it not, hood.
• Laminar flow bench? Yep, that’s a hood too.
• PCR dead air box? Somehow also a hood.

Like, surely you’re not doing BSL-2 work in a LAF? Please tell me you’re not doing that.

Thrashy, 25 days ago

My grandfather was a Marine and later a Secret Service agent. He didn’t tell many stories, but one of the few he did was about riding a helicopter down to the ground through autorotation during engine-out testing – this was apparently while they were qualifying the original Marine One for Eisenhower’s use.

Helicopters are sometimes rightly derided as “a collection of spare parts flying in loose formation” but in this case it seems like they were spitting in the face of God and daring him to do something about it – flying into dangerous terrain, in inclement weather, in what very likely was an old and ill-maintained aircraft. That’s a lot of bad choices to make at once.

Thrashy, 25 days ago (edited 25 days ago)

If it ain’t leaking that means it’s empty, etc…

Thrashy, 25 days ago (edited 25 days ago)

It’s not a coincidence that Texas is a hotbed of development for “microgrid” systems to cover for when ERCOT shits the bed – and of course all those systems are made up of diesel and natural gas generator farms, because Texans don’t want any of that communist solar power!

I’ve got family in Texas who love it there for some reason, but there’s almost no amount of money you could pay me to move there. Bad enough when I have to work on projects in the state – contrary to the popular narrative, in my personal opinion it’s a worse place than California to try and build something, and that’s entirely to do with the personalities that seem to gravitate to positions of power there. I’d much rather slog through the bureaucracy in Cali than tiptoe around a tinpot dictator in the planning department.

Thrashy, 25 days ago

I exaggerate – but Magic Rock is doing booming business installing strings of natural gas generators at Buc-ee’s across the state, and I’m currently dealing with an institutional client who wanted to provide backup power for a satellite campus, and didn’t even stop to consider battery-backed PV on the way to asking for a natural gas generator farm.

Thrashy, 26 days ago

This is the thing. Netanyahu is a sociopath who needs a forever war or else he eventually has to face the music. Without outside military intervention, this only ends in one of two ways:

1. either Bibi drags it out long enough to ethnically cleanse all of Gaza, claim he defeated Hamas, and memory-hole the intelligence failures that allowed the October 7 attacks to succeed in the first place, or
2. he loses control of his political coalition, elections are called, and he’s quickly removed from his PM position, put on trial for corruption and then thrown in prison for what will probably be the rest of his life.

Prolonging the war doesn’t guarantee he won’t end up in scenario 2 anyway, but from his perspective at the very least he’s running out the clock. Dead Gazans (and to a lesser extent dead Israelis) don’t matter to him.

Thrashy, 27 days ago (edited 26 days ago)

Historically AMD has only been able to take the performance crown from Intel when Intel has made serious blunders. In the early 2000s, it was Intel commiting to Netburst in the belief that processors could scale past 5Ghz on their fab processes, if pipelined deeply enough. Instead they got caught out by unexpected quantum effects leading to excessive heat and power leakage, at the same time that AMD produces a very good follow-on to their Athlon XP line of CPUs, in the form of the Athlon 64.

At the time, Intel did resort to dirty tricks to lock AMD out of the prebuilt and server space, for which they ultimately faced antitrust action. But the net effect was that AMD wasn’t able to capitalize on their technological edge, Ave ended up having to sell off their fabs for cash, while Intel bought enough time to revise their mobile CPU design into the Core series of desktop processors, and reclaim the technological advantage. Simultaneously AMD was betting the farm on Bulldozer, believing that the time had come to prioritize multithreading over single-core performance (it wasn’t time yet).

This is where we enter the doldrums, with AMD repeatedly trying and failing to make the Bulldozer architecture work, while Intel coasted along on marginal updates to the Core 2 architecture for almost a decade. Intel was gonna have to blunder again to change the status quo – which they did, by betting against EUV for their 10nm fab process. Intel’s process leadership stalled and performance hit a wall, while AMD was finally producing a competent architecture in the form of Zen, and then moved ahead of Intel on process when they started manufacturing Zen2 at TSMC.

Right now, with Intel finally getting up to speed with EUV and working on architectural improvements to catch up with AMD (and both needing to bridge the gap to Apple Silicon now) at the same time that AMD is going from strength to strength with Zen revisions, we’re in a very interesting time for CPU development. I fear a bit for AMD, as I think the fundamentals are stronger for Intel (stronger data center AI value proposition, graphics group seemingly on the upswing now that they’re finally taking it seriously, and still in control of their destiny in terms of fab processes and manufacturing) while AMD is struggling with GPU and AI development and dependent on TSMC, perpetually under threat from mainland China, for process leadership. But there’s a lot of strong competition in the space, which hasn’t been the case since the days of the Northridge P4 and Athlon XP, and that’s exciting.

Thrashy, 26 days ago

The only link I am aware of is that Intel operates an R&D center in Haifa (which, it happens, is responsible for the Pentium M architecture that became the Core series of CPUs that saved Intel’s bacon after they bet the farm on Netburst and lost to Athlon 64). Linkerbaan’s apparent reinvention of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the contrary, the only real link seems to be that Haifa office, which exists to tap into the pool of talented Israeli electronics and semiconductor engineers.

Thrashy, 28 days ago

I can’t wait for Cold War 2: Thermonuclear Boogaloo.

Thrashy, 28 days ago

In one of my psych courses the professor noted a study (not sure of the source, this was closing in on twenty years ago now) that while psychotherapy had pretty good efficacy for certain things, it was equivalent with “talk openly with your friends about it” in most metrics. A therapist is great for providing specific strategies to address particular challenges (for issues like PTSD, for example, a therapist can help to manage an exposure therapy approach) but after a point you’re kinda just paying through the nose for somebody to professionally emulate you having a healthy friendship with a well-adjusted person.

Thrashy, 30 days ago

On the one hand, I agree with you that the expected lifespan of current OLED tech doesn’t align with my expectation of monitor life… But on the other hand, I tend to use my monitors until the backlight gives out or some layer or other in the panel stackup shits the bed, and I haven’t yet had an LCD make it past the decade mark.

In my opinion OLED is just fine for phone displays and TVs, which aren’t expected to be lit 24/7 and don’t have lots of fixed UI elements. Between my WFH job and hobby use, though, my PC screens are on about 10 hours a day on average, with the screen displaying one of a handful of programs with fixed, high contrast user interfaces. That’s gonna put an OLED panel through the wringer in quite a bit less time than I have become used to using my LCDs, and that’s not acceptable to me.